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New Scientist 2015 holiday quiz

This year’s question masters are Festival of the Spoken Nerd, the live science-comedy phenomenon from stand-up mathematician Matt Parker, experiments maestro Steve Mould and geek songstress Helen Arney. Copies of New Scientist have been a constant companion during their nationwide Just for Graphs tour – have you been reading as closely as they have?

1. A 1000-year-old Anglo-Saxon cure for styes contained what?

a) Animal dung
b) Bullock’s gall
c) Grass seeds

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2. During an hour-long price glitch at Amazon, how much were some £100 items discounted by?

a) 80 per cent
b) 90 per cent
c) 99.99 per cent

3. Which of these may help children with dyslexia improve their reading?

a) Musical training
b) Tinted glasses
c) Extra maths lessons

4. How did Google choose to deal with this year’s leap second?

a) Add it gradually over a few hours
b) Count both 23:59:60 and 00:00:00
c) Insist everyone use Google Time (requires a Google+ account)

5. How fast did a pedal-powered vehicle go in 2015 to break the speed record at Battle Mountain in Nevada?

6. Carrots won’t help you see in the dark, but what food could help slow down macular degeneration?

a) Spinach
b) Beetroot
c) Horseradish

7. What did researchers at Cornell University use detailed population maps from the 2010 US census to do?

a) Predict future population trends, in which remote areas of Montana and Nevada become unexpected hubs
b) Show how natural disasters would impact the US economy, identifying Montana and Nevada as key locations
c) Develop an online zombie outbreak simulator that showed optimal survival locations in Montana and Nevada

10. Ants have specific roles in their colony, but what has a newly discovered class been travelling to a rival colony to do?

a) Engage in play behaviour
b) Mate with the queen
c) Steal food

(Image: Idil Sukan/Draw HQ)

Chart toppers

We have two pairs of tickets to Just For Graphs in London – for details on how to win, visit bit.ly/NS_SpokenNerd

Answers

1. b Bullock’s gall. The remedy also contained garlic, leek and wine, and might actually kill superbugs. Refined animal dung used to be a component of gunpowder. And grass seeds sometimes look like dung.

3. a Studies suggest that musical training may help children who have difficulty reading. The effectiveness of tinted glasses has been called into question, and Matt Parker’s call for extra maths lessons is simply wishful thinking.

4. a They added it gradually over a few hours. But that’s not how everyone does it, and the discrepancies cause all sorts of problems.

6. a Spinach contains lots of lutein, zeaxanthin, and meso-zeaxanthin – yellow pigments that act like UV filters for your eye cells. Other options include kale, peppers and even eggs.

7. c Researchers applied models describing the transmission of infectious disease to real-world population distributions, to show how zombies would spread.

8. All are correct! In 2014, scientists at the University of Liverpool, UK, solved the problem with a computer. But the resulting proof is so big there is no hope any human will be able to check it all. In 2010 the online Polymath Project made some progress by crowdsourcing the problem. Only in 2015 was former child prodigy and current maths superstar Terence Tao able to take a result from the Polymath project and extend it into a full solution.

10. c Some Costa Rican ants devote their lives to stealing food from neighbouring nests. It was geckos on board the International Space Station that were spotted playing, a highly unusual behaviour for reptiles.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Fingers on buzzers…”